Milestones

Milestones describe some temporal "rendez-vous" within the project. They will fix some timeline to help delay controlling in the construction of the project objectives, and will define some imperative time points when some part of the work MUST be performed.

Milestone are usually setup imperatively by the teacher or the project manager. They will also represent some special moments where project activity can be evaluated, and when a partial review of the project can be performed.

Milestone may be used in a quite "large" semantic space. a mechanical oriented project could for instance be divided in such a scheduling :

Identify constitant models for problem solving

Proceed to faisibility calculations

Design the system

Draw the component maps

Design manufacturing proceedements

Establish manufacturing methods

Establis measurement and qualification plan

Make a prototype

Test the prototype

Feeadback models and design with results

Test a premanufacturing serie

...

These steps will always split the timeline into definite periods. Milestone will not be refinable using a tree refinement model. Tasks will be used for that need.

Milestones and assessments

Milestones are key points of the project, in that way they define a particular "instant" when a work state examination can be done. The techproject module uses milestones as assessment phasing basis.

Any dated milestone will split the project schedul within two distinct phases (one runs till the milestone deadline, the latter runs ahead from the deadline date). The assessment submodule will add as much assessment form entries as required by the number of dated milestones.

Viewing milestones

Miletones are viewed as a simple list.

Milestones are not necessarily reorded 'by date' in the display. A user command is nevetheless provided for reordering the list.